


A Geography of the Heart

by apocketfulofwry



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, neurosurgery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 04:06:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12903657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocketfulofwry/pseuds/apocketfulofwry
Summary: Petyr Baelish and Sansa Stark attempt to navigate the pitfalls of a clandestine relationship.A prequel of sorts to Lust for Life.





	A Geography of the Heart

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, for Ophelia Raine, who pushes me to prose, and for Expected Aberrance, who understands.

_Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it._

**Matthew 7:13-14**

\-- 

The love affair began with a poem. 

Four stanzas of rhyme. Four beats and stresses in each line. The words flowing without pause past the end into the next sentence. The rhythm steady as the ticking of a metronome, with the occasional spondee picking up the pace.

A drafty classroom in primary school. The mid-morning light barely passing through frosted glass. A stray sunbeam illuminates dust motes in random swirl along its path before ending its journey on one of the rows of wooden desks clustered in the middle of the room. On these sat a gaggle of young children dressed in the uniform attire of a Catholic-run institution. They were made to recite quatrain upon quatrain after Morning Prayer, until rote repetition begot memory, until the very words were etched into their very soul and being.

_I am the master of my fate._

_—_

It is said that childhood experience forms us; that it makes up the very structure and core of our person. Our childhoods dictate the stages of our progression into the finality of adulthood whether we recognize it or not. Our collections of private hurts and public triumphs. A procession of memory embedded in hazy recollection to be evoked at the oddest of times.

Our family histories mold us. The genetic predispositions of ailments and personality passed on to us by our parents. The very people who should be held accountable for the upbringing of a child – for the child never asked to be born.

Young Petyr Baelish, was no longer in possession of a family. Thus his hurts and triumphs remained his, and his alone.

—

“You need to talk to people, Petyr.” Catelyn is wealthy. She isn’t from around here. She lives in the big house on the outskirts of town with a family as redheaded as she is. Her father makes her come on Sundays to mingle with the kids at the orphanage. Her father wants her to remember, to never forget the privilege she was born into. 

“I talk to you,” he mumbles at the floor. Catelyn’s eyes are so blue and Petyr finds them so very pretty.

“I’m not here all the time, silly.” Petyr wishes she would never leave.

“I know that.” But Sundays are all they have.

—

Though small in stature and size, he was nonetheless gifted with significant intellect. The incisive precision of his remarkable mind dissects into the denotation of every stanza, the iambic tetrameter of each line ringing out loud as their high children’s voices cut through the cold winter air in the poorly insulated room. It fixed itself into his developing consciousness; growing from recognition, to understanding, to belief.

That you make or unmake your own destiny had become his fundamental dogma.

Petyr’s absolute conviction in his own power to dictate his fate, and the wiry, slender body in which this will was housed, made him a most formidable captain on the ship he sailed upon life’s oceans. He went from strength to strength, triumph upon triumph. Resilient and steadfast. 

_I am the captain of my soul._

Words were his weapon, his mind that limb that wielded it. Words to mesmerize, to hypnotize, to create a reality of his own design. 

—

Later on, as a young man, he came across a small bit of knowledge that would then change his life forever: The poem that had governed much of his life’s thoughts and actions had been written by its author as he lay on the cusp of losing his leg to a surgeon via tuberculosis.

It was then that passion swung into certainty, with the realization that the man capable of moving the thoughts and ambitions of a young Petyr to such great heights was himself at the mercy of another, higher power.

He throws himself into his studies with even more determination. He touches all the requisite milestones at their appointed times, and moves from classroom to hospital setting right on schedule, for service, for ambition. 

—

The great man himself, Tywin Lannister – broad of shoulder, and uncommonly tall – pauses in his ER rounds to observe Petyr suture a forearm laceration. The smooth curvature of the needle puncturing, then gliding smoothly through skin and subcutaneous tissue, plumbing the depths of the cut to breach upwards through skin once more. Dr Lannister observed the neatness of Petyr’s knots, the even spacing of his sutures. The way the previously jagged edges of the wound had been trimmed and apposed together without indentation or overlapping crease. 

Though his countenance remained severe and unimpressed, he gives Petyr a small nod of approval.

“Good hands.”

“Thank you, sir.” Out the needle goes and into the waiting grasp of a pair of pickup forceps. A minute rotation of the wrist, needle holder in hand secures the suture’s two throws into a perfect square knot. Another couple of separate throws to lock the knot in place. Petyr carefully arranges the tie slightly off-center so as to avoid irritation on the still raw wound.

“Steady hands. You scare easily, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“See that you never do. You’ve got surgeon’s hands.” 

Petyr knew then the course his life would plot. To make the required shift from repairing rent flesh to making that first incision, to drag the stainless steel blade across virgin skin, slicing through its layers like a fish through water, leaving in its wake a bloom of red as blood from the transected small vessels well up to the cut surface.

His natural brilliance and dogged pursuit of nothing less than perfection in every endeavor he undertook would inevitably land him into that most exalted of surgical specialties. That elusive permutation of excitement, of manual and mental dexterities, of power and social status a perfect fit to his not insignificant ego.

To be able step into the operating theater, hands and arms damp to the elbows and scrubbed into sterility, ready to do battle with the monsters inhabiting the brain. Gown and gloves, his armor and gauntlet, nurses instead of squires. For a helmet on his head was mounted the LED light source and a pair of magnifying glasses, their fiberoptic cables arcing around him like plumes. The damsel, a soft, fragile jelly scored by sulci and gyri, which housed the hopes, dreams, affections and fantasies of its owner. 

—

As a young man, new to the practice, the intense anxiety that characterized the beginnings of every surgery held the potential to maim, to stop Petyr in his tracks. A brief moment of penetrating self-doubt that he eventually learned to accept as a normal part of his occupation, and forged on despite it.

He feels the same rush, the crippling torment of potential failure, like probing through the minefield of the vessels surrounding an aneurysm whenever he is in the presence of Sansa Stark.

The controlled selfless violence of the operating field transmogrified into the measured altruistic passion of his hunger for her.

They probe at each other, daring each other to step past their freshly constructed boundaries. To test trust, to test faith. They build silence upon silence, to see who will break first that they may return to what passes for normalcy between them. 

—

On the nights Sansa spends with him on-call, under the cover of darkness, he would, armed with a flashlight, study the incredible Atlas of her body.

He imagines her heart to be the asymptote on the graph of a calculus equation. That critical, elusive point on which all of his graceful infinite curves, like the gentle swell of her hips, will never reach.

\--

1/3

**Author's Note:**

> The poem that Petyr recites as a young boy is Invictus, by W. E. Henley


End file.
